Lifetime Legal

shiraz99

Anyone use the services of Lifetime Legal via their EA and then changed EA?

The reason I ask is I accepted the EA's option to use LL who duly appointed a local solicitor firm but I now want to ditch the EA for another and would like to know whether I can continue to use the appointed solicitor or do I have to go through the rigmarole of searching a new solicitor and filling all the relevant forms out again.

eddddy

I'm sure that the solicitor firm will be more than happy to have your future business.

Which firm is it?

(Personally, I would be very cautious of any solicitor who was appointed in the way you describe - you'll probably be paying huge hidden referral fees to all the people in the chain.)

It's often better to get personal recommendations for solicitors from friends / family - because their recommendations aren't based on being paid a huge fee by the firm they recommend.



But have you signed some kind of contract that means you must use your allocated solicitor - and/or pay a fee if you don't?

shiraz99

There's no hidden fees, everything was up front with a fixed price. I agree I'm sure the solicitor would take on the business anyway but there was a bit of a discount via LL so would probably be.more expensive if going directly.

eddddy

shiraz99 said:

There's no hidden fees, everything was up front with a fixed price.

There will definitely be hidden referral fees. They will be hidden in the fixed fee that you have been quoted.

• A chunk of the fixed fee will go to the estate agent
• A chunk of the fixed fee will go to Lifetime Legal
• The solicitor will keep the rest to pay for their conveyancing service

Here are 2 estate agents who mention the referral fees paid to them by Lifetime Legal

• The first agent says that Lifetime Legal pay them a fee of between £225 and £600 per referral.
• See: https://www.greyfox.co.uk/referral-fees/ 

• The second agent says that Lifetime Legal pay them an average fee of £536.47 per referral
• See: https://www.chancellors.co.uk/pdf/referralfactsguide.pdf

So if, for example, the solicitor has quoted you £800 in legal fees, it's quite possible that £400 to £500 of that will just be referral fees.

shiraz99 said:

....but there was a bit of a discount via LL so would probably be.more expensive if going directly.

Out of interest, who told you that?

Unfortunately, when people want you to part with your money, they're not always 100% honest and transparent - they sometimes mislead you.  I suspect you've been misled.

shiraz99

Yes, there will be referral fees but when you mention paying "huge" hidden referral fees I assumed you were on about fees on top of what has already been quoted in the fixed price fee.

As far as being misled is concerned I don't believe I have. The quoted, fixed price is fully itemised, and very competitive in comparison with all the other quotes I got directly from other solicitors prior to accepting their deal, including the one I got from the same firm that was selected via LL which happened to be quite a bit more expensive had I gone with them directly rather than via LL.

Anyway, none of this is actually answering my original query.

eddddy

shiraz99 said:

Anyway, none of this is actually answering my original query.

I think I answered your query in my first post - I'm sure the solicitor will be happy to have your business, even if you change estate agents.

The original estate agent and Lifetime Legal will still get their referral fees, so they'll be happy as well.

But the new estate agent might be a bit annoyed - they might want to refer you to their choice of solicitor - so they get a referral fee instead. (I suspect that they'll be especially choked that they are losing referral fees to a competitor. So they might push you very hard.)



More generally, the advice is often not to go with solicitors recommended by estate agents - because of a potential conflict of interests.

The estate agents might be giving lifetime legal dozens of referrals per year - so this would be a very lucrative arrangement. Both companies will be making a lot of money from all the conveyancing jobs.  Conversely, you will only providing one conveyancing job - so you're much less lucrative.

So the Estate Agent and Lifetime Legal might be more concerned about keeping each other happy, rather than keeping you happy.


But since you're changing estate agents, that might be less of an issue.


The reason I went beyond answering your query is because I think it's helpful to understand how businesses work behind the scenes. The more information you have, the better decisions you can make.

eddddy

Going a bit off topic - just for additional interest, here is a webpage where Lifetime Legal promote all their referral options for Estate Agents.

https://www.lifetimelegal.ltd/index.php/referral-types-and-definitions/

A cynic might describe message behind this webpage as "Look at all the 'extras' that we can sell to your buyers/sellers - so that you earn extra money, and we earn extra money."



It's also interesting that Lifetime Legal ask Estate Agents to...

• "Warm up the client..." to make it easier to sell the buyer/seller conveyancing services

• "Provide a note to us with the referral, tell us what the client is doing, why they are moving – anything that will help us build rapport quickly."

(So a salesperson might casually say to a buyer something like "We do lots of conveyancing for NHS staff" -  and the buyer thinks "Wow - that's great because I'm a nurse". But the salesperson already knew that, because the note from the Estate Agent told them.)


To be honest, lots of businesses use these types of tactics. So like I say, it's useful to understand the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.


FWIW, I'm sure that Lifetime Legal will see these posts - they'll be monitoring all social media closely for mentions of their name - so maybe they'll  change/hide some of their website content. It will be interesting to see if that happens.